Transformative tools for self-awareness

Imagine this: You remember you need to do something for work. You inspect the task. The task seems to be hard and annoying! You really don’t want to do it. It would be such a pain to do it! Immediately you sling your phone out of your pocket, unlock, scroll — the pain is numbed and you wake up 3 hours later realizing how much of your life you have wasted and that you again succumbed to your brain protecting you from discomfort.

Feels familiar? It may not be a problem that you have, but I bet that there are other seemingly uncontrollable behavioral vices that hold you back. As for me, I struggle with this every single day.

Surely, there are many ways of preventing this: Putting your phone away before working, breaking the task down into smaller steps, meditating beforehand, planning a specific time for working, … But we humans, or at least I personally, fail regularly at not distracting myself, even though I am well aware of possible countermeasures. And again, this is just one in a myriad of examples where our brains and subsequently our actions don’t align with our values, to say it lightly. In many situations it’s impossible to plan beforehand and you end up doing what you are habituated to do — and it’s often not quite amazing. Add to that list of crappy behaviors all the cognitive biases that influence our decision making to the worst regularly.

Now imagine this: What if we could be made aware of these biases and unconcious beaviors? What if you were made undoubtedly aware that you are having an anger fit or procrastinating or spinning inside a spiral of negativity, during that moment? I propose that being made conciously aware of this would make you more likely to take control of your behavior. Similarly, being aware of a bias would make you more likely to inspect and re-evaluate a biased decision.

And that is exactly what I want to achieve. Not a tool for thought, a tool for getting you to thought in the first place! I want to give people a look inside themselves and help them see their actions and decisions and give them more control over themselves.

I am yet to figure out how to do it, but I am moving towards it. Hey, even writing this down has considerably helped me resurface my old mission and set me on the right path.

The next steps are to read more books, papers and pieces on this topic and get involved with people who work on similar stuff.\ And of course, write and talk about it.